In middle school in the late 70s I took a test that was supposed to indicate my future career. The suggested careers were given a probability ranking. The top two results, by far were Entertainer at number 1 and Scientist at number 2, with the difference in probability between them almost imperceptible. Every other career was so less probable they barely registered.

Yesterday I took my car to get a dent fixed. It was one of those dents that, while barely visible, required a lot of time and expense to fix. (In fact, you had to kind of crouch down and look very closely at the underside of one panel to see it.) But given that it cut all the way through the paint, I couldn’t ignore it!

When I collected the car in the evening, I was glad to see no evidence of the time when car met kerb a couple of weeks before.

The mechanic’s quality of work was marked by the fact that there was no evidence that anything had happened at all. He told me that the most enjoyable part of his job is meeting his customers – and making sure that they are happy with his work.

We’ve recently been spoilt with opportunities to talk directly to our customers and partners, with two shows in quick succession: Cisco Live and Infocomm. The enthusiasm of people who attended demos, talks and presentations was palpable. It was a great opportunity to learn first-hand about the issues people are facing, and how new capabilities of our solutions are helping to address them.

In an era of constant technological evolution, our utilization of different technologies, including mobile devices, has had massive impact on the financial services industry. As a result, the industry is facing major disruption as new technology translates into new ways of exchanging value (money). In fact, digital payment concepts are constantly developing, with technology advances changing the payment universe as we know it. Disruptive innovations, such as Apple Pay, continue to gain scaled acceptance globally. Contactless payment solutions could take us a step further towards getting rid of the security and convenience shortfalls of traditional credit and debit cards, but it’s important that a capable, secure network is put in place before digital payments can truly flourish.

The Changing Payments Landscape

The first official currency was introduced in Turkey in 600vBC and, around 1661 AD, coins evolved into bank notes. In 1946, the first credit card was introduced and since the start of this century technology advances have disrupted the world of money more than once. In 1999, European banks started offering mobile banking while in 2008, contactless payment cards were issued in the UK for the first time. Now, driven by mobile and Internet technologies, we are in the early stages of fundamentally changing how we perceive the concept of money. Financial control is no longer only in the hands of the financial industry. Today, entrepreneurial minds are connecting us to our (and others) money in new and innovative ways.

Smartphones and tablets have recently become common devices with 79.4 million U.S. consumers who shop online. According to (source) 51% of U.S. digital buyers are expected to make purchases using a mobile device. New services like Apple Pay and mobile payments (M-payments) are becoming increasingly common in financial services. The questions we must begin to consider are, who will be the key providers in the financial services market in the future and what sort of payment ecosystem will emerge? Read More »

There are some innovative ways to make money nowadays, and sometimes kids can come up with new ways that we hadn’t thought about. For examples, we know some kids in the area who are raising money for various charities. Instead of asking their relatives to sponsor them or going door-to-door to the neighbors to get the money, one child decided to sell duct tape wallets and homemade potpurri, while another decided to sell her book collection to raise money. Those kids clearly are thinking about new ways to get money for something old and traditional.

In the world of service providers and networks, the demand for new and better services continue to grow, while the networks must expand and quickly adapt to these demands. One way that operators are evolving their network is to Read More »

For years, industrial control systems have been characterized by proprietary devices, protocols, communications, and applications. However, at the Hannover Fair last spring, virtually every exhibitor showed products that support IP, Ethernet, or Wi-Fi interfaces—something that would have been unthinkable just a decade ago.

The Internet of Everything (IoE) is driving this change, with an exponentially growing number of connections among people, process, data, and things. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a key enabler of this evolution. By 2020, according to Cisco’s analysis, there will be 50 billion connected devices—all needing a common way to work together.

As I discussed in my last blog, the worlds of Information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) are converging—and they are converging around standards. The good news is that the industry is recognizing that a fragmented, proprietary model does not scale, and inhibits the value of IoT deployments. The IoT standardization efforts are focused on four different areas: Read More »

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